The present disclosure relates to information retrieval, and more specifically, to a system and method to reformulate long natural language questions so they can be answered by a question-answering system.
Information retrieval (IR) deals with methods of returning relevant information or documents from a store of knowledge; question-answering (QA) specifically deals with returning information in response to natural language questions. A QA system discovers and evaluates potential answers and gathers and scores evidence for those answers from unstructured sources, such as natural language documents, and structured sources, such as relational databases and knowledge bases. The QA system uses a combination of techniques from computational linguistics, information retrieval, and knowledge representation for finding answers.